Wow, thank you very much, Rick!! Great to see the spirit behind this legendary band is still alive, not only amongst the fans, but also amongst its members.

Wow nr 2 here! Your new HTM website is totally amazing. It really smells HTM in every inch, sorry i didnt mean smell. Change that to - I got a great HTM vibe all over. Watched some of the rare photos and the Catch a rising star video with the live clip on stage really blew me away. Thanks Rick! This website is my new favorite one

Ps. I will add link and stuff on the main page here soon!

Watching the timeline I wondered what would have happened if HTM had signed with Passport Records. Although that label didn't survive either, it had a much more progressive attitude than Arista. And Larry Fast, one of their directors I believe, made some great elektronic albums and played with Peter Gabriel (which completes a circle somewhere....).

That Catch A Rising Star-video was beautiful.

Loved the two tracks with the new HTM as well, but it made me wonder. They look so professional, a DVD-release worthy (even split-screen scenes were made). But how is it possible in this digital age that they look as if they come from a video-tape that has suffered from a magnetic attack?

Hey All...

Thanks so much for the kind words....

I have been blessed and grateful for having the opportunity to bring all of this information forward.

So you know, there is a missing clip from the early days from a video shoot we did with a gentleman named Abe Rittenhouse at a local Harrisonburg Virginia location, I believe with Cliff. I think it had "Passion's Passing" on it, maybe another song or two. It was TV quality but I don't believe anyone in the band ever had a copy, so it may be lost forever.

The other missing piece of the puzzle in my opinion is that we HAD at one point the two tracks we recorded for Peter Gabriel. I know they exist somewhere, as I heard them myself several years after we recorded them. After scouring the archives of Kit, Wayne and Ace Pace many years ago, no one seemed to turn up with them. Once again, I suspect they exist in an improperly marked tape box somewhere, but until they are uncovered, such is life....

It seems weird to me also that no one in the band was really a "camera" person - it would have been great to have some photos of us in the warehouse studio with Gabriel. None exist that I am aware of.

Will update the site continually as new stuff appears...

Rick

Thanks a lot, Rick! I guess the world of archive-boxes is a whole lot more difficult to explore than the information on internet these days. But at least we now know there are some things recorded, both on video ("Passion's Passing") and on tape (Peter Gabriel). Maybe Peter has them somewhere ;-)

very cool...took me back to the days of listening to Happy the Man on WGTB and seeing the shows at the Cellar Door and The Fairfax Theater. Nice work Rick!

Yes i agree with you bubinga it took us back to the days of listening to Happy the Man on WGTB.

www.mysefer.com

<a href="http://www.mysefer.com">Jewish Books</a>

Hey

Rick here, just wanted to explain and hopefully clear up any confusion surrounding the two Happy the Man sites.

Frank had done the original reunion website around 2000 or so and spent a lot of time, and did a really quality job. However, when the site had not been updated for a number of years, I asked Frank if I could take the original happytheman.com site over - with the idea of updating everything. I decided I wanted to do a more all-encompassing version of the site covering all of the years of the band. We originally discussed having my site replace the original site, but I didn't have the heart to take the site down which Frank had built and spent so much time on. Additionally, it was important for me to do the new site my way, and from my perspective - and I did not want to "answer" to the band or feel a need for them to approve anything I wanted to put up. I thought the best answer was to simply add my site, along with a disclaimer stating that the site is from my perspective - and not an "official" band site - and leave the original one up, updating both of them as news rolled in and as my time permits.

Hope this helps.

I finally finished with the help of my childhood friend Johnny "Chicago" Hornberger, (photographer extraordinaire and former HTM crew member) a gallery of my unusual medium scale bass collection, with an overview of my history as a bass player - and a complete description and history of each instrument. For any gear heads out there, who might be interested, the site is at www.innertainment.net

Also, upon a preliminary listen glance - without really studying and A-B ing the new Esoteric Masters of Happy the Man and Crafty Hands - I will say definitively that this is the first time you will clearly hear my bass playing, which for a number of reasons just hasn't been present on previous releases. After the test pressings were received of the first album Ken Scott called me directly and explained that since the album was rather long they had to compress the vinyl grooves substantially and what actually suffered first and foremost was the bottom end. I am thrilled that my playing as originally conceived is now clearly represented. It makes my heart sing.

Best to all....

Rick Kennell

Thanks Rick!

You've made me very curious about the new editions of HTM and Crafty Hands! The expanation from Ken Scott sounds common. Genesis-albums from those days were quite long too and also had a very soft bass-sound. With the SACD-mixes this was a lot better.

Although I'm not a bass-player I really enjoyed visiting your bass-site. Cool pictures from Happy The Man.

Is it right that the link isn't added yet?

Thanks for the update Rick, looking forward to getting the CD's!

just out of curiosity...if its not too much of a pain to answer, I've always wondered what is the story behind the masters that were used for this lastest re-issue? Is there a 2inch tape of the final mix that is given to Esoteric to use, or do they work off of something digital?

I seem to recall a story that before the One Way releases in 1999 it was thought that any final mix masters were lost, but suddenly one was found? And its believed that any 24 track masters are lost forever? (hence, we'll never see a 5.1 mix). Anyway, always curious about this stuff...any and everything happy the man!

Hi Rick,
Think you did the good desicion about the websites.The feeling of visiting your site is the way you described it - your way of HTM. It's great to have you around here - we really need some fresh things to discuss here. And we are off course honored to have you here, Rick.

Wonderful news to us about the quality off bass sound of the remaster. A very interesting detail to know which makes wanna buy it that's for shure. Bill told us before that you used the Rickenbacker on the first self titled album, - I can clearly hear all things you play (great playing by the way) ..and if that will be with more pump, well thats awesome. Looking forward to hear it.
.............................

steamingears,
I put a link on the image on the main page, but you are correct, I should have added a link at the side bar among the other website links. I will do that when I fix the link errors very soon.

Yes, be happy to elaborate on the original masters...

What happened was, there was a bit of a SNAFU and wherever Arista LA ended up storing them, no one could find them. Of course, in 1977-78 things were not cataloged on computer as they are now so it's not an easy process to look though huge warehouses - it is like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Everyone figured the original 2" masters and mixes had to be stored in L.A. - as that is where we recorded, and it is very expensive and doesn't make sense to ship heavy master tapes from coast to coast for no real reason.

When the Japanese wanted to include Happy the Man in their European Rock Series (I think they really believed that we were from Europe) I was working with Arista trying to locate the masters. They eventually got the word from L.A. that nothing could be located, so the only other alternative from Arista's main New York office, was to explore their east coast warehouse in Allentown, Pennsylvania. It was a bit of a long shot, but I had to give it a try. They had gone back and cataloged nearly all of the old masters, but they had a section of the warehouse, that was not cataloged and those tapes were from the era during which our tapes were recorded.

A few more weeks went by and Arista's legal department finally called and said: How badly do you really want these masters to see the light of day on this Japanese release? I said, Look, it really isn't about this Japanese release, we need to know that the masters exist somewhere. They said they were willing to xerox all of the tape boxes which were not cataloged and send the stuff to New York. He asked me if I would be willing to spend a day at the Arista offices going through the xeroxes to see if the tapes existed. I said, sure, I would be happy to spend a day going through it

So a couple of weeks later I got a call and I went to the offices and there was a stack of xeroxes when stacked up would easily go all the way to the ceiling.

I spent the better part of the day going through them, seeing all sorts of interesting masters along the way - and finally managed to find both of them. Trouble is, they were merely non-dolby safety copies, not the original true masters. In those days, they ran safety copies on non-dolby machines, just so they had SOMETHING available if all the other copies are lost. They made dupes and sent them to Japan, of course, there was no tape machine in the offices so they went out unlistened to. I was elated just to find them. I had no idea what they sounded like. Well, turns out - if you want to know what a non-dolby safety copy sounds like, listen to those Japanese releases! They didn't do one thing to try and clean them up or get rid of the hiss - they just released them exactly as they were. In their defense, during that era, they probably thought it was a noble thing not to mess around with an artist and with the sound of their master tapes.

We were pretty unhappy with the way they sounded, so Kit cleaned them up and more or less "mastered" them in his home studio. This was the early nineties and he did an amazing job. These are the masters that most everyone is familiar with up until now. They are the masters that One Way and Musea used for their releases.

Esoteric got in touch with me kind of at the last minute. I actually pitched them for Kit to do the mastering, hoping he could take another shot with the newer technology and equipment he has in his studio now. Esoteric kind of has their own in-house mastering set up and they probably had the masters already done by the time we had communicated - so they politely declined the Kit offer. They claimed that they put up the vinyl vs. the Kit Masters to see what to use as their starting point and actually ended up using Kit's versions.

So there you have it.....

Thanks Rick for this great inside information. Lately I read something about this on the Progressive Ears-forum too, which was funny, because someone thought those Japanese versions were the best there were. Actually I always thought they used a not so good LP for the mastering, hearing all those hissy sounds. And of course I thought it was a great mistake to leave out the end-sounds from Steaming Pipes (which weren't on the compilation-disc Retrospective either). But in those days you were HAPPY to have Happy The Man on CD, so the quality was less important.

Interesting story thanks Rick. So your'e not a european band, that's what I thought

When speking of hiss, - the One Way version of Better Late has got some hiss, but otherwise it sound fine. I believe that Kit did the job on that one.

Is there a One Way version of Better Late? I thought that they were released by Wayside Music and Cuneiform? My Wayside-version was partly Re-mixed onto DAT by Kit in 1989.

Cant find the CD, but i am shure you are right. There's plenty of hiss at the beginning of Labyrinth. Please do correct me if i am wrong there.